I love Work in Progress (unless its mine). If a new play takes the time it should to write, there are jewels and nuggets along the way that can be stitched into the final tapestry – like a meandering river forming oxbow lakes. Some sequences of language make stand-alone pieces – or even short films.
Bookshop is from the play-script of Lynton, Richard Bradbury’s new play about the poet Shelley.
Bookshop, directed by actor/filmmaker Aidan Casey, gives us an 1812 flashback as Elizabeth Hitchener muses on her early love of books, despite her poor background in Lewes. She is to join Shelley later in Lynton, Devon, where their relationship becomes profound. This lovely moving montage of shirt-lace, voice, fingers (turning up a Shelley) and old books beautifully evokes love for literature and ideas in a girl who wasn’t expected to have any. I asked Aidan about the filming, and was there a fixed story board? There wasn’t, but he’d known the books